All of Andrew's Comments + Replies

The general cluster of things called "kundalini awakening" is also called the "Arising and Passing Away" stage in some early buddhist traditions, check out the section with that title in Daniel Ingram's book. The A&P is seen as a "mini-awakening" and the real beginning of the spiritual path in some traditions, because after you have it, meditation quality changes permanently. In particular, vibrations (or "impermanence" for the official buddhist lingo) are much, much easier to see during daily meditations after you get this experience, that change is permanent as far as I can see. Immediately after the big amazing experience usually comes a deep crash, where your meditations feel like shit, you feel like you can't narrow your focus very well even in daily life, and generally get sad and unmotivated, these stages are called the "dukkha nanas", or "knowledges of suffering", and immediately precede the first stage of traditional awakening, which generally has less fireworks than the A&P.  You did well to stop meditating if you were feeling unbalanced psychologically, the general recommendation in those situations is to do plenty of physical exercise and very non-spiritual stuff like playing video games. Very motivated people sometimes go straight from the A&P through the dukkha nanas and get awakening in the same retreat, but it is really, really rare, so you'd likely have spent the rest of the retreat miserable and wondering why your meditations started sucking out of the blue, and without a framework where you expected something like this to happen, these events could be ridiculously confusing. Don't worry about repeating that exact experience if you start meditating in daily life, retreat conditions are very extreme, and if you do get something similar in daily life it will be much milder the second time. However, the general theme of feeling terror during peak meditation experiences is likely to remain. For a few months before my initial awakening experience I ha